Asad, Formations, ch 7 “Reconfigurations of law and ethics in colonial Egypt”

Asad, Formations, ch 7 “Reconfigurations of law and ethics in colonial Egypt”

SUMMARY: Chapter examines how secularism evolved in Egypt by looking at how it came to be used in the changing ideas of shari’a (Muslim law) in Egypt (outline and thesis, 208-209). Gives history of Arabic word for “secular” (206-208). Describes history of legal institution changes in Egypt (210-212) and possible reasons why they were done (212-219). He also goes in to the changing idea of itjihad (219-222), of “subjective interiority” and autonomy (222-226), and of “family”—especially as expressed by Abduh (228-235). He then goes on to analyze how the philosophy Western law (vs. morality) developed and came to be picked up by Egyptians (236-240), and then specifically how the shari’a was adapted philosophically (focusing his attention of Safwat’s understanding of it) (241-253). Asad ends by giving an overall evaluation of secularism in general (255-256).


205-looks at how secularism is treated in 19th and early 20th century Egypt

206-the word for secular appeared in the late 19th ce: almaniyy, derived from al-alam (“the world”); though note #2 says that for many years throughout the 20th century and today many still use the word ‘ilmaniyy (though it is seen as incorrect) which is derived from the word ilm (“knowledge” and “science” in contrast to “religion”); (207) the modern word for “to secularize” (almana) was created in the 19th century and had a similar meaning to the original meaning of saecularisatio, to transfer religious property to worldly purposes; at the same time, the word waqf which is typically understood as “religious endowment” really “was simply the sole form of inalienable property in the shari’a” and sometimes had non-religious (eg when used for agricultural lands) or both religious and non-religious purposes (eg when used for hospitals and schools)

208-in Europe, the words “secularism” and “laicisme” (both denoting that institutions have a non-religious character) dates from the mid 19th century; “laicisme” is a stronger form of secularism because of the Jacobin rebellion against religion—and that these European uses didn’t appear in Egypt at the same time indicates “that political discourse in Arabic did not need to deal directly with it as it has since then. In that sense, secularism did not exist in Egypt prior to modernity.”

Goal: “In this chapter I try to trace some changes in the concept of the law in colonial Egypt that helped to make secularism thinkable as a practical proposition. I focus on some of the ways that legal institutions, ethics, and religious authority became transformed, my purpose being to identify the emergence of social spaces within which ‘secularism’ could grow.”, (209) Asad is concerned “with exploring precisely what is involved when conceptual changes in a particular country make ‘secularism’ thinkable.”’ Asad looks at 2 late 19th century analyses of the event of the narrowing shari’a and increase of “secular” laws

Thesis: “I claim that the shift in these texts reflect reconfigurations of law, ethics, and religious authority in a particular Muslim society that have been ignored by both secularists and Islamists.”



210-Though officially part of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt “possessed a large measure of political autonomy” (cf Islamic Law in the Modern World and Peters “Islamic and Secular Criminal Law…”); throughout all the ottoman empire, “shari’a courts had primary jurisdiction over urban Muslims, rural tribes followed customary rules and procedures (‘urf), and milliya courts were regulated by and for the various sects of Christians and Jews…Indeed, the ruler had his own body of administrative law (qanun) that did not draw its authority from the shari’a. From the mid-nineteenth century on, a series of progressive legal reforms was carried out in the empire under the rubric of the tanzimat (the Commercial Code was issued in 1850, the Penal Code in 1858, the Commercial Procedure Code in 1861, and the Maritime Commerce Code in 1863) that involved the wholesale adoption of European codes. The first attempt in the Ottoman empire to codify the shari’a, known as the majalla, was published (211) over a period of seven years, from 1870 to 1877. Officially it had jurisdiction throughout the empire, but in fact it was never effective in Egypt. [cf Law in the Middle East; and note #12 says there were attempts to codify it in the 16th and 17th century] There the formal control of Egypt’s national budget by the European powers, to whom it had become heavily indebted, very quickly led (in 1876) to the introduction of a civil code for the Mixed Courts of Egypt—an autonomous institution administered by European judges by which European residents (over one percent of the population at the end of the nineteenth century) were legally governed in all matters including their interactions with Egyptians (thus disputes between natives and Europeans always fell under the jurisdiction of the Mixed Courts). A code for shari’a courts was promulgated in 1880 and substantially amended in 1887. In 1883, a year after the Britihs Occupation of Egypt, a modified version of the code used in the Mixed Courts was compiled. For the National (ahliyya) Courts, both codes being based mainly on the Napoleonic Code. On the other hand, courts administering shari’a law, often described by European historians as ‘religious courts,’ were deprived of jurisdiction over criminal and commercial cases and confined to administering family law and pious endowments (awqaf). The so-called ‘secular courts’ (both Mixed and National) had jurisdiction over the rest. The bureaucratization of the shari’a courts (that is, the introduction of an appellate system, a new emphasis on documentation in judicial procedure as well as the authorization of written codes) drew on Western principles and incorporated the shari’a into the modernizing state.” [note #14 says to cf Scott “Judicial Reform in Egypt,” Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation no. 2 July 1899, the author of this article “was charged by Lord Cromer, the British consul-general, with overseeing these reforms” and “repeats the colonial notion that ‘until recently there was no such thing as native justice’ (p. 240).”] ; (212) “In 1955, under Jamal Abdul Nasir, the dual structure of the courts was finally abolished.” [note #15 says this was done ostensibly because of the “unsatisfactory nature” of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim court judgments, but really for bureaucratic unification, cf Anderson “modern Trends in Islam”]

212-there is a dispute among historians over “why the reformers looked to European rather than build on preexisting shari’a traditions.”, some say it was the result of European coercion and Egyptian elites’ Europeanization, (213) though others have said European society was simply better, and others said European law wasn’t imported, but Egyptian law just changed its emphasis—(214) though Asad says this last view is not helpful in understanding secularization—and others think the changes were essentially Egyptian, but imitated European laws to resist “direct European penetration”—but Asad says motives were diverse “especially in different periods” (eg in early 19th century when Muhammad Ali did penal reforms to reflect the European system, he did this “to consolidate his own control over the country’s administration of justice”, in admiration of Europe’s ability in that skill), (215) though “The attempt at explaining major social changes in terms of motives is always a doubtful business.”; but in the end, no matter what the motives, “the result was to help create new spaces for Islamic religion and morality.”

216-Asad, therefore, criticizes the view that we should always see the colonized in terms of resistance to imperial power; (217) the new laws in Egypt were made out of resistance and also imitated Europeans



217-Even though Weber, through the influence of Snouck Hurgronje, saw the shari’a as “primitive because it lacked the criteria given to modern law by rational authority, Anglo-American jurists had no hesitation in regarding English common law modern even though it did not embody the Weberian criteria of legal rationality. In other words, there is no consensus on what the decisive criteria are (218) for regarding particular forms of law ‘modern’ in the West.”

218-there were new questions about how to apply Western reforms in state building in Egypt; and “colonial punishment”—police and prisons—“was central to the modernization and secularization of law in Egypt. [cf Policing Islam] And it gradually replaced previous forms of violence.”



-Secularization of Egypt’s law “has not only involved the circumscription and reform of the shari’a, it has been deeply entangled with nineteenth century reformulation of Islamic tradition generally.”

219-in “Mass Culture and Islamic Cultural…” (in Mass Culture, Popular Culture), Schulze says the reason why 19th ce Islam reformers used “the European interpretation of Islamic history as one of ‘civilizational decadence’” was because first, the change of economy and political legitimation beginning in the 18th century and the increased use of print—“books from and about Europe, as well as the Islamic ‘classics’ selected for printing by European orientalists and by Westernized Egyptians. That civilizational discourse could now be used, concludes Schulze, to legitimize the claim to equality and independence.”

-“Itjihad (a term used by earlier Muslim scholars to refer to independent legal reasoning on matters about which they were not in agreement was made to mean the general exercise of free reason, or independent opinion, directed against taqlid (the unreflective reproduction of tradition) and in the cause of progressive social reform.”; in Islam and Modernism in Egypt, Adams says itjihad “belonged only to the great masters of the early generations and has consequently not existed since the third century A.H. [9th c C.E.]” [direct quote from Adams]; But “there is no such thing as ‘real’ itjihad waiting to be authenticated by orientalist method; there is only itjihad practiced by particular persons who situate themselves in various ways within the tradition of fiqh.”, “Since itjihad comes into operation precisely when ijma (the consensus of scholars) has failed, the disagreement of [Muhammad] Abduh and [Rashid] Rida on this point [about whether itjihad uses a specific reasoning] with other Muslims, past and contemporary, (224) does not signify that their view is no longer ‘traditional.’ On the contrary, that disagreement or difference is what makes it part of the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence.”; and now more scholars disagree with the idea itjihad stopped and they argue that “change was always important to the shari’a, and its flexibility was retained through such technical devices as ‘urf (custom), maslaha (public interest), and daruna (necessity).”, cf Hallaq Law and Legal Theory, Gerber Islamic Law and Culture, Johansen Contingency in a Sacred Law

*222-Asad says Schulze’s reasons for Islamic shifts is “too instrumental” (ie done as a tool solely to claim indepence); “When major social changes occur people are often unclear about precisely what kind of event it is they are witnessing and uncertain about the practice that would be appropriate or possible in response to it. And it is not easy to shed attitudes, sensibilities, and memories as though they were so many garments inappropriate to a singular historical movement. New vocabularies (‘civilizational,’ ‘progress,’ ‘history,’ ‘agency,’ ‘liberty,’ and so on) are acquired and linked to older ones. Would-be reformers, as well as those who oppose them, imagine and inhabit multiple temporalities.”

224-the mural exclusivity of Sufism to “orthodox Islam” was taken up by Orientalists and early sociologists (including Evans-Pritchard, E. Gellner, and C. Geertz), but some people are now criticizing this dichotomy, eg Maldisi is Studies on Islam



225- there is a popular but “mistaken assumption…that modernity introduced subjective interiority into Islam, something that was previously absent. But subjective interiority has always been recognized in Islamic tradition—in ritual worship (‘ibadat) as well as in mysticism (tasawwuf[??]). What modernity does bring in is a new kind of subjectivity, one that is appropriate to ethical autonomy and aesthetic self-invention…”; and, following P. Berger, Skovgaard-Petersen believes choices for Muslims are expanding concerning lifestyles (cf Defining Islam for the Egyption…), though asad says this view (226) “obscures a complicated picture” because there are new restrictions (eg minimum age for marriage, laws on polygyny, etc)

226-However, Asad agrees with Skovgaard-Petersen that “The individual is now encouraged—in morality as well in law—to govern himself or herself, as befits the citizen of a secular, liberal society. But…this autonomy depends on conditions that are themselves subject to regulation by the law of the state and to the demands of a market economy…[and] the encouragement to become autonomous is primarily directed at the upper classes. The lower classes, constituted as the objects of social welfare and political control, are placed in a more ambiguous situation.”

-so we must look at “how the reordering of social life (a new moral landscape) presented certain priorities to Islamic discursive tradition—a reordering that included a new significance being given to the family, a new distinction being drawn between law and morality, and new subjects being formed.”



228-in 1899 Muhammad Abduh, the year he was appointed Grand Mufti of Egypt, wrote about the use of shari’a courts, he realized that most of the lower classes, and much of the middle and upper classes had “abandoned kinship (229) and affinal sentiments” and ties were centered around the household—the modern “family”, which was an idea concurrently (230) growing in the West; all at the same time as the “idea of a society made up of equal citizens governing themselves individually (through conscience) and collectively (through the electorate)” was being deployed in the West through institutions developed for social sciences and social problems (which were often combined)—“families” were seen as an “object of administrative intervention, a part of the management of the modern nation-state”, “precisely when modern political economy, the principal source of government knowledge and the principle object of its management, begins to represent and manipulate the national population in terms not of ‘natural units’ but of statistical abstractions…”, and this ‘legal formation of the family gives the concept of individual morality its own ‘private’ locus that the shari’a can now be spoken of as ‘the law of personal status’”, (231) “In this way it becomes a secular formula, defining a place in which ‘religion’ is allowed to make its public appearance through state law.”

231-18th century Arabic dictionaries did not have the modern Arabic word for family, a’ila, showing how it was only picked up in the 19th century as the idea became common for Egypt’s rural population by (232) the mid 19th century because of “forced labor and military conscription, a general decline in the economic condition of handicraft workers and petty traders due to the penetration of European capitalism, as well as the reform of landholding and taxation system.”, the conscripted man was allowed to bring only his nuclear family with him when he was moved away from the village—the wives had to go with their husbands because without their husbands there, they wouldn’t get as much material support; the “family” only first appears in Egypt’s census in 1917; plus upper classes were adopting Western domestic styles and (233) “practiced a discourse of the ideal family—typically expressed in terms of ‘the problem of the status of muslim women’”

234-many saw “sentiments of love” to be essential for this family; note #67 gives a quote form P. Gay’s The Education of the Senses in which Gay points out that though intimate love is timeless, in the 19th century it becomes “more concentrated than ever”, “Potent ambivalent feelings between married couples, and between parents and children, the tug between love and hate deeply felt but rarely acknowledged, became subject to more severe censorship than before, to the kind of repression that makes for neurosis. The ideology of unreserved love within the family was attractive but exhausting. Father’s claims on daughters and mother’s claims on sons, assertions of authority or demands for devotion often masquerading as excessive affection, acquired new potency precisely as the legal foundations for authority began to crumble. Increasingly, family battles took place, as it were, not in the courtroom, but in the minds” [direct quote from Gay, pp. 444-45]

235-and the modern view is that morality is to be learned in the private family



**-“…the social and cultural changes taking place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…created some of the basic preconditions for secular modernity. These involved the legal constitution of fundamental social spaces in which governance could be secured through (1) the political authority of the nation-state, (2) the freedom of market exchange, and (3) the moral authority of the family. Central to this schema is the distinction between law (which the state embodied, produced, and administered) and (236) morality (which is the concern ideally of the responsible person generated and sustained by the family), the two being mediated by the freedom of public exchange—a space that was restructured in Egypt by the penetration of European capital and the adoption of the European law of Contract, a space in which debates about Islamic reasoning and national progress, as well as about individual autonomy, could now take place publicly.”



236-Ahmad Safwat, a lawyer, made in 1917 probably the first work to argue “rigorously” the “secular distinction between law and morality” by applying the new version of itjihad; he says that marriage used to be (and still is for the low class), “an institution designed for sexual pleasure and procreation,” but now (237) it’s a “contract between equal parties”, and Safwat thinks his marriage reform suggestions “are not contrary to the fundamental principles of the shari’a, and proposes a reexamination of the basic sources of that law”—and the shari’a is not seen as “sacred” (see Chapter 1)—as well as the Qur’an, Sunna, ijma, qiyas (analogical reasoning)

238-“The distinction between law and ethics is itself made in jurisprudential terms that are traceable in European thought at least as far back as Grotius [cf The Invention of Autonomy and The Rights of War and Peace], a distinction expressing the idea that law is the domain of obedience to a civil sovereign and morality the domain of individual sovereignty in accordance with inner freedoms (conscience).”

239-“The idea of an inner, conscience-driven moral law is taken for granted by Safwat…where transgression is sanctioned only by punishment in the next world, there is (religious) morality…the distinction between ‘morality’ and ‘law’ can be defined in parallel ways as rules, and that their obligatory character is constituted by the punishment attached to them.”

*-“…even in the Western liberal scheme morality is connected to the law in complicated ways. The authority of legal judgments is dependent on the ways, justice, decency, reasonableness, and the like are culturally interpreted; the credibility of witnesses is linked to ways ‘good’ or ‘bad’ character are culturally recognized, assessed, and responded to. Furthermore, there is the general sense that the laws in force should be consistent with the prevailing morality.” [cf A History of the Criminal Law of Egypt and Common-Sense in Law]

*-since in Egypt codes introduced were mostly “European and secular while morality was largely rooted in Islamic tradition. (240) This leads to the question of how interpretive tendencies and assumptions of ‘secular’ law engage with sensibilities and predispositions articulating ‘religious’ morality. If traditionally embodied conceptions of justice and unconsciously assimilated experience are no longer relevant to the maintenance of law’s authority, then that authority will depend entirely on the force of the state expressed through its codes.”



240-“…it is the power to make a strategic separation between law and morality that defines the colonial situation, because it is this separation that enables the legal work of educating subjects into a new public morality.”

-note #79 quotes James Fitzjames Stephen, “one-time legal member of the viceroy’s council”, who explicitly wrote in 1883 that government in Egypt does not represent the will of the people and “The law, while not itself a moral system, is indispensable to the replacement of an inferior morality.”

241- shari’a has 3 classifications for rules: “ibadat (rules governing relations between God and the faithful), mu’amalat (rules governing proper behavior between the faithful), and hudud (rules defining limits to the behavior of the faithful through penalties).”; “modern secular law not only excludes the first as being beyond its purview. It also redraws the distinctions applicable to proper behavior and punishments in terms of ‘civil law’ and ‘criminal law.’ It does all this in accordance with different principles. Furthermore, Safwat’s division deliberately ignores the fivefold shari’a ranking of acts—required (wajib), recommended (mustahabb), indifferent (mubah), discouraged (makruh), and forbidden (haram).”

-and virtue is no longer based on following the acts of Muhammad, it is related to being in accordance with law

242-Snouck Hurgronje was “the first Western authority” on shari’a and “regarded fiqh as an incoherent mixture of religion, ethics, and politics—not as a functioning law but as a theory of the ideal Muslim society that had practical significance only in matters relating to ritual devotions, family relations, and endowments. This view, says Johansen [in Contingency in a Sacred Law], has had a profound effect on Western students of Islam who have tended to see fiqh as a deontology—a system of religious and moral duties—rather than as a law in the rational sense.”, but later Schacht (“perhaps the most important orientalist of the twentieth century to specialize in Islamic law”) “did see that fiqh was not simply a compendium of religious duties but a system of subjective rights, and so inaugurated a new, and more fruitful, approach because fiqh could (243) now be seen as a legal system that private individuals could use ‘for their individual strategies of claims and counter-claims.’ [direct quote form Johansens]”



245-Kant’s idea that each person has moral certainty “would surely be rejected by medieval Islamic theologians and jurists.”, (247) who would say that moral judgment (and therefore ethics, not law) are based on one’s learning from books and society

248-Safwat, however, appeals to reform of shari’a with a Kantian sense of morals, and the result is “a rearticulation of the concepts of law and morality”; though Abduh doesn’t use this appeal, (250) Abduh sees morality taught by (local) traditions and fiqh, and this is based off the 14th century jurist Ibn Taymiyya—(252) in other words, a dominant Muslim understanding of morality was based off of physical practices that have been passed down, so secularism changes the way Muslims think about their own bodies, an idea reinforced in Marcel Mauss’ “Techniques of the Body”



253-the implementation of Western laws, no matter however much Egyptians tried to adapt them to Islamic ones, was a “revolutionary change”

*255-religion “comes to be thought of in moral term” (eg Safwat), Kantian’s ethics (and it did not follow the Kierkegaardian view which saw religion as distinct from ethics); so now ethics presuppose “a specific political realm—representative democracy, citizenship, law and order, civil liberties, and so on. For only where there is this public realm can personal ethics become constituted as sovereign and be closely linked to a personally chosen style of life—that is, to an aesthetic.”

*-“A secular state is not one characterized by religious indifference, or rational ethics—or political toleration. It is a complex arrangement of legal reasoning, moral practice, and political authority. This arrangement is not the simple outcome of the struggle of secular reason against the despotism of religious authority.”, and legal judgment is (256) ultimately connected to punishment and pain because “it is always based on coercion”, “responds to different kinds of sensibility, and authorizes different patterns of pain and suffering”, all while redefining “the concept of the human.”

Asad Formations, chs 4-5

Asad, Formations Ch. 4 “Redeeming the ‘Human’ through Human Rights”


SUMMARY: Asad begins by exposing a paradox to modern ideas of human rights as expressed in the UDHR (128-29). He then goes on to discuss the development of the idea of liberty and rights (130-137), then how these ideas play into the UDHR (137-140). Malcolm X and others have used ideas of human rights to avoid having to appeal to the state (141-144), but using state-based ideology has been more productive for those in the Civil rights movement and the US government (144-147). Also, the defining of human rights ends up defining what it means to be human (150-157).

128-Western interventions in other countries can have devastating effects, even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Article 25 says “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the (129) right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”

-IMF interventions, for example in the 1990s in Indonesia and Russia, have caused these problems though they have not been looked at as a violation of human rights because the responsibility is supposed to be with individual states, but in the case of Indonesia and Russia, their ability “to uphold certain rights was directly compromised by IMF and U.S. policies aimed at liberalizing national economies.”; responsibility is placed on individual nations, according to Article 25 and “Damage done to the economy of another country (as in the case of the deliberate interventions I have mentioned) does not constitute a violation of human rights even if it causes immense suffering because in the final analysis the responsibility for the damage is borne only by the governors of ‘national economy,’ and in any case it is considered a short-term cost of a long-term benefit.”

129-Asad says he’s not assigning blame but pointing out how responsibility is assigned in the secular system of “human rights”; “Nothing essential to a person’s human essence is violated if he or she suffers as a consequence of military action or of market manipulation from beyond his own state when that is permitted by international laws. In these cases, the suffering that the individual sustains as citizens—as the national of a particular state—is distinguished from the suffering he undergoes as a human being. Human rights are concerned with the individual only in the latter capacity, that inalienable rights define the human does not depend on the nation-state because the former relates to a state of nature, whereas the concept of citizen, including the rights a citizen holds, presupposes a state that Enlightenment theorists called political society…Yet the identification and application of human rights law has no meaning independent of the judicial institutions that belong to individual nation-states (or to several states bound together by treaty) and the remedies that these institutions supply—and therefore of the individual’s civil status as a political subject.”


130-in medieval times, jurists said “property rights” were “natural,” but they still said property rights depended on “reciprocal duty in accordance with objective (because divinely given) criteria”; in the later middle ages, the idea that property was natural for all men regardless emerge; then in the 16th century there was a debate over whether liberty was “owned” and therefore alienable like property, or (in the view of the Dominicans and other similarly-minded groups) that liberty was not property, but essential to human existence

131-“it was no accident” that modern rights theories began in Portugal and the Netherlands, “the main centers of the slave trade at that time”, and Molina and Grotius took the side that liberty was property and could be traded; though there were debates over whether the state or the individual had rights

-in the 17th century, John Selden, and English follower of Grotius, said that laws had obligations and punishment, so a person was aware of these aspects of rights, and this distinguished people from animals, “conversely, only subjects who possessed rights could be regarded as human”

-Hobbes “merged the idea of supernatural punishment with the idea that all punishment was in a crucial sense natural”, (132) in Leviathan he explains there is natural redemption—injustice gets violence, pride gets ruin, negligence with rebellion, cowardice with oppression, etc., and he thought rights were transferable (and they should be transferred to the state who would protect all); later Locke said there was “natural good and evil”, giving “natural” morality a “religious foundation”

132-radical objected to hobbes, saying rights weren’t transferable (eg Overton), (133) or Matthew Hale said there are natural laws men know without government

134-In Natural Rights Theories, Tuck points out that today liberal theory still has the contradiction: some principles are dependent on the fact that we live in society (therefore, based off consent); others are completely independent, a minimal morality

135”…it has been argued that because the massive growth of public debt in the seventeenth century increased the precariousness and volatility of property—especially the new financial forms of property, distinct from the older, landed, ‘real’ property—this development contributed to an intensified sense of the self’s contingency among the middle and upper classes.”, so “the essence of the human comes to be circumscribed by legal discourse: The human being is a sovereign, self-owning agent—essentially suspicious of others—and not merely a subject conscious of his or her own identity. It is on this basis that the secularist principle of the right to freedom of belief and expression was crafted.”

-“Whatever its early history may be, today only a strong, secular state can enforce natural rights and its successor as the law—whether that relates to the treatment of persons or of property.”, human rights depend on “national rights—that is, rights that constitute, protect, and punish one as the citizen of a nation-state. This also means that the state has the power to use human rights discourse to coerce its own citizens—just as colonial rulers had the power to use it against their own subjects. In defending its citizens’ human rights it is only the state that can legally threaten to punish violators.”, and (136) political theorists who deal with the emergence of rights in Euro-America don’t address this issue—(137) they don’t consider that these rights are used in colonies, rights are “sentimentalized as ‘the human family.’”


137-“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins by asserting ‘the inherent dignity’ and ‘the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,’ and then turns immediately to the state. In doing so it implicitly accepts the fact that the universal character of the rights-bearing person is made the responsibility of sovereign states, each of which has exclusive jurisdiction over a limited group within the human family. This limited population is—as Foucault noted [in Technologies of the Self]—at once the object of the state’s care and a means of securing its own power. In other words, although the individual does not have the right to decide his own fate, authorities of the state of which he is a citizen have the constitutional right to decide it for him.”

-“The Declaration states that unless human rights are ‘protected by the rule of law,’ subjects will be ‘compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.’”, so “There is no explicit recognition that what is allowed by the law may be unjust and therefore intolerable; there is only the statement that nothing contravening human rights can be lawful (which is either a tautology or untrue)”—because “The Declaration seems to assume a direct convergence of ‘the rule of law’…with social justice…If that is the case, the rule called law in effect usurps the entire universe of moral discourse.”

-it also then “privileges the state’s norm-defining function…thereby encouraging the thought that the authority of norms corresponds to the political force that supports them as law.”

-it’s a revival of natural law that came from the “moral revulsions” of Nazi state actions; Nuremberg trials “introduced the notion of crimes against humanity into international law.”, though in note #22 Asad says “…the Nazis carried out their policy of extermination not because there was no universal human rights charter at the time, but because Hitler’s Germany had the organizational means and ruthlessness to do it, and because the Allies could not or would not intervene. In general The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been more useful for punishing criminals convicted of genocide than for preventing the crime.”

139-and though there are now multi-state regions that have charters for human rights, these are just “proto-states whose individual member-states retain considerable authority.”

-and today groups define human rights in different ways and these conflict with state views—and states then respond by redefining the norms and identity of rights and the groups (eg when it comes to religious rights, which are often in Western countries only given to beliefs, and practices are often limited—which changes a religion’s identity); (140) plus definitions of human rights vary from state to state


141-Asad quotes Malcolm X who called for leaving behind the struggle for civil rights (because the whole idea of it is controlled by the oppressors) and instead struggle for human rights, and (142) connected language of human rights with revolution (in Malcolm’s case, he wanted a revolution against the US) which has been done before: English Bill of Rights of 1699 came after the 17th century civil war, American Bill of Rights came after the War of Independence, French Revolution gave “Rights of Man and the Citizen,” (145)and UDWR of 1948 came after WWII

144-Malcolm’s failure was due to the fact other states (countries) couldn’t intervene to help



-The US has 2 prophetic narratives: Pilgrims get religious freedom, and colonies escape despotism; (145) both these only define human as a certain class of people and exclude blacks and native Americans; the stories are very important: “Americans have retold the story to authorize claims about rights, inequality, membership, history, and their meaning: [Direct quote from Shulman “American Political Culture”], these stories encourage “the identification fo social crises and the condemnation of social injustice, both by those who occupy the ideological center of American liberalism and those who stand outside it as its critics.”—eg civil rights movement used it

146-says reason why MLK mobilized more Americans than Malcolm is because he used this story

-the US government also uses that story for its International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, (147) in which it sets “up an office in the State Department to report annually on religious persecution in all foreign countries (that is, excluding the United States)”, and Section 2 (a) says it’s continuing in the spirit of the founding fathers who wanted religious freedom; it’s an attempt to globalize human rights because Americans see themselves as the Chosen People



150-in defining human rights, you are also defining what it means to be human (including what are essential aspects of one’s body) when you identify what obstacles are to human nature; at the same time, only a sovereign power has the power to define this, so even though some people (like Nussbaum in Women and Human Development) define human rights as arrived at by consensus, it’s really not

151-the West (especially the US) has this sovereignty because it controls culture, “vocabulary, concepts and meaning in many fields” [direct quote from Ramonet “The Control of Pleasure”]; (152) and the global economy—(154) political power, from no matter what culture, changes all other cultures by defining humanity (especially when “humanity” is seen as redeeming people from “traditional culture”

154-in fact, forces in general, not just sovereign cultures, shape culture; (155) eg the unstable job market in US has made it more difficult to have a “realization of ‘character’”(cf The Corrosion of Character); and as the separation between “public politics and private belief is seen to crumble, the new terrain is occupied by a discourse of human rights that can be taken as either sacred or profane.”

156-definitions of “human” have been affected by animal rights theories and (157) development of genetic engineering—and this is made more complex because the UDHR article 17 “provides a guarantee to entrepreneurial property throughout the world”—Guillebaud, in Le Principe d’humanite, argues property issues concerning genetic engineering will be used to legitimize slavery and racism


CH 5 “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe”

SUMMARY: “Identity” has become more important for Europeans since the 1960s (161), and the idealized understanding of “Europe” selects different experiences, ignoring some (including Muslims) (161-168). This understanding is taken to be “Europe’s” essence (168), excluding others from the identity of “Europe,” and encouraging assimilation (170). This persists in the “world-wide society” today which is modeled and controlled by Europeans and Americans (172). Asad then looks at the development of ideas of political representation and minority (173-174), and he believes that minorities are always subjected to the power of the majority (175). He also examines alternatives to this system (177-180).

159-Thesis of the chapter: “Europe…is ideologically constructed in such a way that Muslim immigrants cannot be satisfactorily represented in it. I argue that they are included in and excluded from Europe at one and the same time in a special way, and that this has less to do with the ‘absolutist Faith’ of Muslims living in a secular environment and more with European notions of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ and ‘the secular state,’ ‘majority’ and ‘minority.’”

-takes it “for granted that in Europe today Muslims are often misrepresented in the media and discriminated against by non-Muslims.”; the majority of Western Europeans fear that (160) Muslim values “are an affront to the modern secular state”



161-“The general preoccupation in the social sciences with the idea of identity dates from after the second World War. It marks a new sense of the word, highlighting the individual’s social locations and psychological crises in an increasingly uncertain world.”; note #4 says in the first edition of International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1930-35), there was no entry for “identity” and it didn’t appear until the 1968 edition (cf Gleason “Identifying Identity: A Semantic History”); “Previously the more common meaning of identity was ‘sameness,’ as in the statement that all Muslims do not have ‘identical interests’ and attributively, as in ‘identity card.’”’ “In Europe the newer twist in the sense of the word is almost certainly more recent than in America. Perhaps in both places the discourse of identity indicates not the rediscovery of ethnic loyalties so much as the undermining of old certainties. The site of that discourse is suppressed fear.”

-“The idea of a European identity, I say, is not merely a matter of how legal rights and obligations can be reformulated. Nor is it simply a matter of how a more inclusive name can be made to claim loyalties that are attached to national or local ones. It concerns exclusions and the desire that those excluded recognize what is included in the name one has chosen for oneself. The discourse of European identity is a symptom of anxieties about non-Europeans.”



-Asad looks at “some uses of the concept ‘Europe’—rather than in tracing its empirical spread.”; (162) A “myth of Europe” has been created and in it people selectively recall shared experiences and interpretations of violence—eg violence of Nazis is felt as a shared, and therefore unifying experience, as well as fighting against Muslim incursions, while violence against non-Europeans in European colonies is ignored and (163) Europe is also identified as Christian throughout its history, even after ideas of natural law started emerging in the 16th century

164-Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s were seen as “in Europe…not of it—and it is precisely for this reason that they should be accorded toleration”; and this (165) characterization is used by liberals and conservatives



166-Europe sees itself as a superior culture that is distinct from others—a “civilization” in multiple senses

167-While many of Europe’s ideas and techniques came from the outside, writers [many are implied, but Asad only cites Trevor-Roper] believe that “The things that belong to European civilization, therefore, are those that were taken up and creatively worked on by ‘Europe.’”, and Asad says includes Locke’s idea of rights to property, that it should be cultivated—so (168) “’European history’ thus becomes a history of continuously productive actions defining as well as defined by law…It is a story that can be narrated in terms of improvement and accumulation, in which the industrial revolution is merely one (albeit central) moment. According to this conception, ‘European civilization’ is simply the sum of properties, all those material and moral acts that define European identity.”

168-“It follows from this view of Europe that real Europeans acquire their individual identities from the character of their civilization. Without that civilizational essence, individuals living within Europe are unstable and ambiguous. That is why not all inhabitants of the European continent are ‘really’ or ‘fully’ European. Russians are clearly marginal. Until just after World War II, European Jews were marginal too…Completely external to ‘European history’ is medieval Spain.”



-“There is a problem for any historian constructing a categorical boundary for ‘European civilization’ because the populations designated by the label ‘Islam’ are, in great measure, the culture heirs of the Hellenic world—the very world in which ‘Europe’ claims to have its roots. ‘Islamic civilization’ must therefore be denied a vital link to the properties that define so much of what is essential to ‘Europe’ if a civilizational difference is to be postulated between them. There appears to be two moves by which this is done. First, by denying that it has an essence of its own, “Islam” can be represented (169) as a carrier civilization that helped to bring important elements into Europe from outside, material and intellectual elements that were only contingently connected to Islam. [cites Trevor-Roper The Rise of Christian Europe p. 141] Then, to this carrier civilization is attributed an essence: an ingrained hostility to all non-Muslims. That attribution constitutes Islam as Europe’s primary alter.”—“Islam” is given “a quasi-civilizational identity”

169-by saying Islam’s history is inessential, you can say Muslim “can be assimilated…into a global (‘European’) civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them [Europeans] regard (mistakenly_ as essential to themselves.” [PROB: the term “essence” asad uses for saying what Europeans deny about Islam may be better said as Europeans just seeing Islam’s essence as weak, cuz they do think it has and essence—and this shows up in polemics about Islam]; (170) and this logic also suggests that assimilation is desirable; “It is not possible for Europe to be represented without evoking this history and the way in which its active power has continually constructed its own exclusive boundary—and transgressed it.”

172-Europe “made itself” through expanding its hegemony over the world—the world-wide society today is based on the European model and Europeans/Americans still regulate it



173-“The ideology of political representation in liberal democracies makes it difficult if not impossible to represent Muslims as Muslims. Why? Because in theory the citizens who constitute a democratic state belong to a class that is defined only by what is common to all its members and its members only. What is common is the abstract equality of individual citizens to one another, so that each counts as one.” And this inevitably leads to the idea that the majority is an approximate representation of the whole (a “majority rules” idea)—“It is no accident that the statistical representativeness emerged in close connection with the construction of the welfare state…and the centralization of national statistics,” and they are important in democratic politics, “demography, social security legislation, market research, and national election politics.”

174-plus the notion of “minority” is not just from statistics, it also comes from “the dissolution of the bond that was formed immediately after the Reformation between the established Chruch and the early modern state. This notion of minority sits uncomfortably with the secular Enlightenment concept of the abstract citizen.”; this doctrine said “it was the state’s business to secure religious uniformity within the polity—or at least to exclude Dissenters from important rights—[and] was crucial to the formation of the early modern state.” And the Enlightenment idea of political community contrasted this because it criticized the religious inequality and wanted all citizens equal (embodied in France’s “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”)—though this theory was also criticized, “notably by Burke for the license it gave to destructive passions, and by Marx for disguising bourgeois self-interest. However, the decisive movements that helped to break the alliance of church and state seem to have been religious rather than secular-Tractarianism in England, and Ultramontanism in France and Europe generally. The arguments they deployed most effectively were strictly theological and were aimed at securing the freedom of Christ’s church from the constraints of an earthly power.” [cf Heim “The Demise of the Confessional State…” in Majorities and Minorities], and as a result minorities became both equal to all and unequal groups which required special protection

-including minorities means including people who have often conflicting historical narratives; (175) “’Minority rights’ are not derivable from general theories of citizenship; status is connected to membership in a specific historical group, not in the abstract class of citizens,” minotirities may be numerically smaller or larger than the body of equal citizens from which they are excluded “Because minorities are defined as minorities only in hierarchical structures of power.”

175-all groups have “narratives, and the practices they authorize, [which] help to define what is essential to each group”, but minority groups are forced to “shed the narratives and practices they take to be necessary [,in this context,] to their lives as Muslims.”



177-a solution to this is suggested by Connolly in “pluralism, multiculturalism and the nation0state” is to shift the idea of pluralism from a “majority narration presiding over numerous minorities in a democratic state” to “a continuous readiness to deconstruct historical narratives constituting identities and their boundaries (which, he argues, have a tendency to become sacralized and fundamentalized) in order to ‘open up space through which care is cultivated for the abundance of life.’” [direct quote from Connolly]; Asad says this is difficult to do , (178) but he hoeps that states can be composed of several minority groups instead of one major one, though this is also difficult to achieve—and focus should not be on identity but on “what it takes to live particular ways of life continuously, co-operatively, and unselfconsciously.”

179-Asad likes Milbank’s idea (cf “Agaisnt the Resignations of the Age” in Things old and new) that it’s impossible for groups’ actions not to affect one another and overlap—it happened in medieval times: “Christendom and Islam recognized a multiplicity of overlapping bonds and identities. People were not always expected to subject themselves to one sovereign authority, nor were they themselves sovereign moral subjects.”—calls this “complex space”

-this “complex space” should be combined with “complex time” (realizing similar things for time as you can with space) and this should reduce the scope for ‘national politics’—necessary in a globalized world (globalized economy, nationalities, etc); (180) but “decisive answers on this subject are too difficult to secure.”

Asad, chs 2 and 3

Asad, Formations CH 2 “Thinking about Agency and Pain”


SUMMARY: This chapter looks at 2 genealogies: those of pain and agency. Asad says that in anthropology, both are generally taken for granted. The notion of “resistance” takes for granted that individuals have “agency.” But definitions of agency really depend on the cultural context, and in the modern world, they include the aim of eliminating pain. However, early Christians and some Muslims look at pain as important for their religious experience.

68-there is a “secular idea that ‘history-making’ and ‘self-empowerment’ can progressively replace pain by pleasure—or at any rate, by the search for what pleases one.”

-anthropological literature hasn’t dealt enough with agency and pain


-“when the word ‘body’ is used, it is more often than not a synonym for the individual whose desire and ability to act are taken as unproblematic” (except for Freudians); in Passion and Action, Susan James describes how “’desire’ came to be thought of as the central force governing all actions.”—there was “an increasingly generic conception of desire” and “passions” are increasingly equated with ‘desire,” “Taken generically, desires lack the inflections that would make them explanatory.” [direct quote from James, p292]

69-and when Freudianism is a sophisticated idea of dynamics of the passions, “it holds out the problematic promise that the passions can ultimately be mastered by reason through systematic observation and interpretation, thereby giving rationality primacy in the constitution of modern, secular subject.”

-there’s no agreement about what emotions are (cf The Emotional Brain); some say they are impulses in the brain, some say they are located in social space, sometimes all emotion is equated with desire, and most people know “some emotions (‘passions’) can and do disrupt or disguise intentions. And yet conscious intention is assumed to be central to the concept of agency in most anthropological work.”—note #6 says: “The intimate anecdotal style of ethnographic writing now favored reflects a preoccupation with intentionality that isn’t always carefully though through.”—and even in medical anthropology which (70) translates all the sick body’s “states and movement directly into ‘dissent’” or “resistance”


70-“The anthropological use of the notion of ‘resistance’ has rightly been criticized for underestimating the strength and diversity of power structures.” (cf Abu-Lughod “The Romance of Resistance”) and it presupposes an idea of “agency”; (71) “The tendency to romanticize resistance comes from a metaphysical question to which this notion of ‘agency’ is a response: Given the essential freedom, or the natural sovereignty, of the human subject, and given, too, its own desires and interests, what should human beings do to realize their freedom, empower themselves, and choose pleasure? The assumption here is that power—and so too pain—is external to and representative of the agent, that it ‘subjects’ him or her and that nevertheless the agent as ‘active subject,’ has both the desire to oppose power and the responsibility to become more powerful so that disempowerment—suffering—can be overcome.”; Asad disagrees with this assumption

72-theorists of culture are conflicted about how they look at resistance/agency: are people always autonomous actors or are they conforming to cultural norms? And because the body and mind decay with age and chronic illness, we should not assume that every act is the act of “a competent agent with a clear intention.”; it’s (73) a paradox to think the free self must be subject to a “liberating self already and always free, aware, and in control of its own desires.”—susan wolf offers an alternative: “rather than constant certainties,” we can think of moral agency in the way we think of sanity (in the common sense way), so that agency (and sanity) are judged in relation to the world in which they live; so different historical contexts make different definitions of agency, with the secular definition being only 1 of many


73-“Agency today serves primarily to define a completed personal action (74) from within an indefinite network of causality by attributing to an actor responsibility to power. Pragmatically, this means forcing a person to be accountable, to answer to a judge in a court of law why things were done or left undone. In that sense agency is built on the idea of blame and pain.”

74-“moderns tend to think of responsibility for something as being founded on a relation between an act and the law that defines the penalty attaching its performance or nonperformance.”; Intention doesn’t matter; and agents (75) can be representatives of principles (which can also be other agents), though there is debate over this when it comes to representative government, and the fact that “crimes of passion” and those of the insane are “not considered to be the consequence of the agent’s own intention.” Reinforces the idea “that agency requires the self-ownership of the individual to whom external power [eg “passions”, “insanity”] always signifies a potential threat.”

78-in 18th century England, Christian agency was that people must be passive and let god take care of them

79-generally cultural theory sees agency of having 2 aims: “increasing self-empowerment and decreasing pain”


80-the secular understanding of pain is that it is inscrutable, and (81) Asad believes it “may arise in part form the experience of animal experimentation of the kind I discussed in the previous chapter, in which observable reactions of the flesh that is subjected to constitutes ‘pain.’”

81-“Whether one can be certain of another’s pain depends surely on who is expressing it to whom, how…and for what purpose ‘certainty’ is sought.”—pain is private and in a social relationship; (83) and “All feelings of pain involve physical changes that are not only internal to the body (muscular, biochemical) but also externally visible (voice, demeanor) and culturally readable. This fact alone complicates the too-neat distinction between physical pain and mental pain.”—distressing emotions cause chemical imbalances, which “are as ‘physical’ as torn ligaments.”—and though maybe “physical pain is typically located by the sufferer in particular parts of his or her body and that this is what distinguishes it form mental distress. But mental states—themselves closely connected to social circumstances—are central in the experience of pain.” As proven by the fact that tolerance to pain is culturally variable

83-and phantom-limb pain shows that “pain is not merely experienced in the mind…but generated by it.”; (84) and in some cultures, “distressing emotions are experienced as being located in particular organs of the body (liver, belly, heart, and so forth).” (cf The Origins of European Thought About the Body); and even in modern society people can feel “sick with anger” and have physical experiences with emotions

84-so pain is a cultural relationship, and “the idea that an agent always seeks to overcome pain diverts attention away from our trying to understand how this is done in different traditions”; (85) pain “is part of what creates the conditions of action and experience”


85-early Christian martyrologies did not see their broken bodies as defeated, but as victorious over society’s power; (86) and generally the Christians, unlike the rest of the ancient world, were “positively oriented…to sickness and human suffering. Where sickness could not be healed, Christians insisted that pain could be understood as valuable.” While Stoics denied suffering and Galenic medicine saw “pain as a bodily condition subject to appropriate technical intervention.”

86-in The Suffering Self, Perkins says stoicism was ruling ideology, though Asad disagrees

87-a study showed that some Native American women often give birth with no drugs to give them a sense of empowerment, knowing that men can’t experience it; (88) and pain is also part of birth

90-some Islamic practices look at pain from fear and other suffering as important in development of virtue


95-McKeon notes (in Freedom and History) that the word “responsibility” appears in England and France in 1787 in the context of the American and French revolutions, and since then its primary use has been political, and so “responsible government”—meaning constitutionalism, the rule of law, and self-determination—has come to be the model not only for political behavior that is imbued with a certain moral quality, but for morality itself.”

96-habitus [(95) “an embodied capacity that…includes cultivated sensibilities and senses…”], in contrast, is not something one can reject, it is essential to what you are and must do—though people often conflate this with “responsibility” (eg conflate morality with criminal law)

98-pain is part of reform; and the (99) Abrahamic traditions of obligations; and secular tradition of individual responsibility


CH 3 “Reflections on Cruelty and Torture”

SUMMARY: The modern idea of ending cruelty conflicts with other values. Legal torture declined in 17th through 19th centuries with rise of circumstantial evidence, and philosophical ideas that criticized its effectiveness and raised the value of imprisonment (107-109). This ideas were imposed on colonized countries where “torture” was a label only given to the colonized and not the colonizers. Also S&M sex is a contradiction in modern society of the idea that people don’t want pain.

100-the simple association of religion with violence, a tactic of some secularists, “will not do” because there have been many atrocities done in the 19th and 20th century without the support of religion; (101) “the modern dedication to eliminating pain and suffering [as articulated in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights] often conflicts with other commitments and values: the rights of individuals to choose, and the duty of the state to maintain its security.”; cruelty has an unstable character in modern secular society

101-G. R. Scott’s History of Torture shows “physical cruelty as a feature of barbaric societies”, and (102) “remains a latent possibility (sometimes realized) in civilized society.”, but Scott “is not entirely clear whether he thinks that human cruelty is merely an instance of bestial cruelty…or whether human cruelty is unique…”; (103) and “savage races” inflict “torture” on modern European Americans, not the other way around (eg pain inflicted on native Americans is not considered “torture”), though he believes modern police use torture

103-in Torture and Modernity, Drius Rejali says, unlike Scott, that torture is integral to the modern state, Rejali says he refutes Foucault’s idea in Discipline and Punishment (and thus also Page DuBois’ Torture and Truth), that torture in modern society is replaced by discipline, Rejali believes torture persists, (104) though Asad this is a misreading of Foucault by Rejali—who Asad says ignores that Foucault says torture persists in secret by police

105-liberal societies no longer approve of torture used in the law, that’s why it’s often denied

107-and today even the “secular Christian must now abjure passion [reveling in pain] and choose action” (early Christian ideas of goodness of pain aren’t used)


-Torture declined with the decline of “Roman canon law of proof—which required either confession or the testimony of two eyewitnesses to convict” in the 17th century with the rise of circumstantial evidence, and that philosophers pointed out that it could not achieve accurate results with confession; (108) plus the rise of the philosophical doctrine in the 19th century that freedom was the “natural human condition”—(109) so imprisonment was equal punishment for all, while fines hurt the rich less and pain hurt the stronger people less

110-Asad says that the imposition of the European modern justice system on colonies was not done out of concern for sufferers of local punishments, but was “dominated” by a need to “create new human subjects”; (111) and sometimes even the colonizer inflicted pain, but this was justified in the name of civilization; (112) and they even forbid religious practices that had self-torture; and their moral superiority was justified by westernized natives who supported it and whoever else agreed with European views


113-today, some pain is accepted—war, sports, science experimentation, death penalty, and in sex (S&M); (115) and new forms are acceptable (eg mass imprisonment and new types of warfare); (116) and while the Geneva Convention tries to regulate conduct in war, medieval war also had rules, which were, “in one sense…even stricter”, “killing and maiming, even in battle [in early medieval times], was regarded as a sin for which the church demanded penance.” (cd The Just War in the middle Ages); and “paradoxically”, by its proscribing certain ways of suffering, other kinds are legalized, and more painful ones were produced with the development of weapons to take out tanks, large guns, planes, etc.; (117) plus the limits of the geneva convention says human destruction cannot outweigh the “military necessity”—but this can be interpreted for any amount of killing

118-sadomasochism is another contradiction between idea that suffering is simply not good; and (122) the UDHR does not say it makes an exception to cruel punishment if people who do it are consenting adults.

Asad, Formations CH 1

Asad, Formations of the Secular

CHAPTER 1 “What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?”

SUMMARY: Examines genealogy of “secularism” and “secular.” “Secularism” doesn’t appear in English until the 1850s, and is as opposed to “atheist,” to avoid dividing people over religion when it came to government policies that no longer used God as the referent (23-24). “Secular” is a term that develops in relation to other terms. For example, the term “myth” was not used by the Greeks in the same sense as we use it today (26-29, 52-53), and the terms “sacred” and “inspiration” have also changed over time, and both were influenced by developments in anthropology (30-36, 45-51). “Secular” was also influenced by a new kind of reading of the Bible (37-44). Asad ends by discussing the problems of the secular myths in the modern world (57-61) and the different views of what it is (62-64).

21-the debate on secularism is over two views: “Is ‘secularism’ a colonial imposition, an entire world view that gives precedence to the material over the spiritual, a modern culture of alienation and unrestrained pleasure? Or is it necessary to universal humanism, a rational principle that calls for the suppression—or at any rate, the restraint—of religious passion so that a dangerous source of intolerance and delusion can be controlled, and political unity, peace, and progress secured?”

22-anthropology rarely looks at secularism, though study of religion in anthropology is pervasive; Tussing revealed that secularism is connected to state violence

23-asad wants to “trace practical consequences of its [myth’s] uses in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries in order to investigate some of the ways the secular was constituted. For the world ‘myth’ that moderns ‘have inherited from antiquity feeds into a number of familiar oppositions—belief and knowledge, reason and imagination, history and fiction, symbol and allegory, natural and supernatural, sacred and profane—binaries that pervade modern secular discourse, especially in its polemical mode.”


-“The terms ‘secularism’ and ‘secularist’ were introduced into English by freethinkers in the middle of the nineteenth century in order to avoid the charge of their being ‘atheists’ and ‘infidels,’ terms that carried suggestions of immorality in a still largely Christian society.”

-note #6: “The word ‘secularism’ was coined by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851. ‘Secularism was intended to differentiate Holyoake’s anti-theistic position from Bradlaugh’s atheistic pronouncements, and, although Bradlough, Charles Watts, G. W. Foote, and other atheists were identified with the secular movement, Holyoake always endeavoured to make it possible that the social, political, and ethical aims of secularism should not necessitate subscription to atheistic belief, in the hope that liberal-minded theists might without prejudice to their theism, join in promoting these ends—an attitude to which he persisted in clinging, despite the small success which it achieved.’ Eric S. Waterhouse, ‘Secularism,’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. II, ed. James Hastings, p. 348.”

24-the “freethinkers” wanted to avoid epithets of “atheist” and “infidel” because they wanted to separate all religious connotations from the emerging “social reform in a rapidly industrializing society”—at the same time, “A critical rearticulation was being negotiated between state law and personal morality”—(note #8: there was a “gradual withdrawal of legal jurisdiction over what comes retrospectively to be seen as the domain of private ethics from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century,” cf Stephen A History of the Criminal Law of England 1883, vol. 2, ch. 25 “Offenses Against Religions”)

-“This shift presupposed the new idea of society as a total population of individuals enjoying not only subjective rights and immunities, and endowed with moral agency, but also possessing the capacity to elect their political representatives…” which happened at once in France and slowly in England; “The extension of universal suffrage was in turn linked—as Foucault has pointed out—to new methods of government based on new styles of classification and calculation, and new forms of subjecthood.”

-“These principles of government are secular in the sense that they deal solely with a worldly disposition, an arrangement that is quite different from the medieval conception of a social body of Christian souls each of whom is endowed with equal dignity—members at once of the city of God and of divinely created human society. The discursive move in the nineteenth century from thinking of a fixed ‘human nature’ to regarding humans in terms of a constituted ‘normality’ facilitated the secular idea of moral progress defined and directed by autonomous human agency. In short, secularism as a political and governmental doctrine that has its origin in nineteenth century liberal society seems easier to grasp than the secular. And yet the two are interdependent.”


25-this chapter looks at “epistemological assumptions of the secular”; “The secular, I argue, is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred.) I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life. To appreciate this…It is a matter of showing how contingencies relate to changes in the grammar of practices.” [a la Wittgenstein] “In my view the secular is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity, although it works through a series of particular oppositions.”; “I try to understand the secular, the way it has been constituted, made real, connected to, and detached from particular historical conditions.”

-“…there is nothing essentially religious, nor any universal essence that defines ‘sacred language’ or ‘sacred experience.’ But I also assume that there were breaks between Christian and secular life in which words and practices were rearranged, and new discursive grammars replaced previous ones.”, (26) “…the sacred and secular depend on each other. I dwell briefly on how religious myth contributed to the formation of modern historical knowledge and modern poetic sensibility…but…this did not make history or poetry essentially ‘religious.’”


26-“West European languages acquired the word ‘myth’ from the Greek, and stories about Greek gods were paradigmatic objects of critical reflection when mythology became a discipline in early modernity.”

-refers to Bruce Lincoln’s Theorizing Myth: Hesiod “associates the speech of mythos with truth (alethea) and the speech of logos with lies and dissimulation. Mythos is powerful speech, the speech of heroes accustomed to prevail. In Homer…logos refers to speech that is usually designed to placate someone and aimed at dissuading warriors from combat.
“In the context of political assemblies mythoi are of two kinds—‘straight’ and ‘crooked.’ Mythoi function in the context of law much as in public, with a full attention to every detail.’, It never means a symbolic story that has to be deciphered—or for that matter, a false one. In the Odyssey, Odysseus praises poetry—asserting that it is truthful, that it affects the emotions of its audience, that it is able to reconcile differences—and he concludes his poetic narration by declaring that he has ‘recounted a mythos.’
“At first, poets tended to authorize their speech by calling it mythos—an inspiration from the gods…later, the Sophists taught that all speech originated within humans.’”

27-for Christians, god is separate from the world, but for Greeks, gods were “directly involved in natural and social processes” [direct quote from Bremmer Greek Religion], and the idea of “nature” is also different for Greeks—“For the representation of the Christian God as being sited quite apart in the ‘supernatural’ world signals the construction of a secular space that begins to emerge in early modernity. Such a space permits ‘nature’ to be reconceived as manipulatable material, determinate, homogeneous, and subject to mechanical laws.” And anything beyond that was (28) “peopled by irrational events and imagined beings. This transformation had a significant effect on the meaning of ‘myth.’”

28-The Sophists say the mythoi of poets are lies (in concerning gods), though they can improve people’s morals; then Plato said that “philosophers and not poets were primarily responsible for moral improvement…Plato changed the sense of myth: it now comes to signify a socially useful lie.”

-“Enlightenment founders of mythology, such as Fontelle, took this view of the beliefs of antiquity about its gods.”



-“But in the Enlightenment epoch as a whole myths were never only objects of ‘belief’ and of ‘rational investigation.’ As elements of high culture in early modern Europe they were integral to its characteristic sensibility: a cultivated capacity for delicate feeling—especially for sympathy—and an ability to be moved by the pathetic in art and literature.”, (29) knowledge of greek stories “was a necessary part of an upper-class education.” And “Myths allowed writers and artists to represent contemporary events and feelings in what we moderns call a fictional mode…And this in turn facilitated a form of satire that aimed to unmask or literalize. Ecclesiastical authority could thus be attacked in an indirect fashion, without immediately risking the charge of blasphemy. In general, the literary assault on mythic figures and events demonstrated a preference for a sensible life of happiness as opposed to the heroic ideal that was coming to be regarded as less and less reasonable in a bourgeois society.”; though in seventeenth and eighteenth century tragedies and dramas, “myths provided the material though which the psychology of human passions could be explored.”

29-for them, “Myth was not really a (mis)representation of the real. It was the material for shaping the possibilities and limits of action.” And it did this “by feeding the desire to display the actual”


30-In Rome, “sacer referred to anything that was owned by a deity, having been ‘taken out of the region of the profanum by the action of the State, and passed into that of the sacrum.’ [Direct quote from Fowler in Roman Essays and Interpretations] However, even then there was an intriguing exception: the term homo sacer was used for someone who, as the result of a curse (sacer esto), became an outlaw liable to be killed by anyone with impunity. Thus while the sacredness of property dedicated to a god made it inviolable, the sacredness of homo sacer made him eminently subject to violence.”

31-the Oxford English Dictionary says “’sacred’ in early modern English usage generally referred to individual things, persons, and occasions that were set and entitled to veneration.”, but for all things that are called sacred (eg a ‘sacred memory,’ sacred rights, sacred fruit), “it is virtually impossible to identify the setting apart or the venerating as being the same act in all cases.”, “It was late nineteenth century anthropological and theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages rooted in changing and heterogeneous forms of life into a single immutable essence, and claimed it to be the object of a universal human experience called ‘religious.’ The supposedly universal opposition between (32) ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ finds no place in premodern writing. In medieval theology, the overriding antinomy was between ‘the divine’ and ‘the satanic’ (both of them transcendent powers) or ‘the spiritual’ and ‘the temporal’ (both of them worldly institutions), not between a supernatural sacred and a natural profane.”

32-sacre wasn’t used by ordinary people in France even in early modern times, they used saintete, “a beneficent quality of certain persons and their relics, closely connected to the common people and their ordinary world.”, sacre started being used at time of the French Revolution and is connected with “secular power”’ eg “The Preamble to the Declaration des Droits de l’homme (1789) speaks of ‘droits naturels, inalienable et sacres.’ The right to property is qualified sacre in article 17. ‘L’amour sacre de la partie’ is a common nineteenth century expression.”; sacre “was now part of the discourse integral to functions and aspirations of the modern, secular state, in which the sacralization of individual citizen and collective people expresses a form of naturalized power.”

33-Isambert, in Le sens du sacre, shows that the Durkheimian school, using Robertson Smith’s idea of “taboo” , came up with “the scholarly concept of ‘the sacred’ as a universal essence. The sacred came to refer to everything of social interest—collective states, traditions, sentiments…The sacred, constituted first by anthropologists and then taken over by theologians, became a universal quality hidden in things and an objective limit to mundane action. The sacred was at once a transcendent force that imposed itself on the subject and a space that must never, under threat of dire consequence, be violated—that is profaned. In brief, ‘the sacred’ came to be constituted as a mysterious, mythic thing, the focus of moral and administrative disciplines.
“It was in the context of an emerging discipline of comparative religion that anthropology developed a transcendent notion of the sacred.”, eg it’s used that way by R. R. Marret

-Marret said all religions have sacraments and sacraments are sacred and have “spiritual authority”, (34) “But it stands in marked contrast, for example, to the medieval Christian concept of the sacrament.”; Asad gives example of 12th century Hugo of St. Victor who defined sacrament as “a sign of a sacred thing” that has “by sanctification some invisible and spiritual grace”—so sacrality depends on a network of signifiers, and so is not naturally endowed with supernatural authority

35-Asad believes this essentialization of “the sacred” was “connected with European encounters with the non-European world, in the enlightened space and time that witnessed the construction of ‘religion’ and ‘nature’ as universal categories.”, first non-Christians were seen to have fetishes/taboos/survivals/superstitions—“objects and relations falsely given truth status, wrongly endowed with virtuous power”—“It may therefore be suggested that ‘profanation’ is a kind of forcible emancipation from error and despotism. Reason requires that false things be proscribed and eliminated, or transcribed and re-sited as objects to be seen, heard and touched by the properly educated senses. By successfully unmasking pretended power (profaning it) universal reason displays (36) its own status as legitimate power…So the ‘sacred right to property’ was made universal after church estates and common lands were freed. And the ‘sanctity of conscience’ was constituted a universal principle in opposition to ecclesiastical authority and the rules of casuistry authorized. At the very moment of becoming secular, these claims were transcendentalized, and they set in motion legal and moral disciplines to protect themselves (with violence where necessary) as universal.”

36-note #41: “It is of some interest that attempts to introduce a unified concept of ‘the sacred’ into non-European languages have met with revealing problems of translation.” Eg Arabic has several different words, each conveying ‘sacredness’ in different senses


37-prior to German Higher Criticism, the bible—written and spoken—was seen as the result of divine experiences and that’s what the body discipline (eg for monks reading it) shaped, (38) but Higher Criticism “rendered the materiality of scriptural sounds and marks into a spiritual poem whose effect was generated inside the subject as believer independent of the senses.”

42-during Enlightenment, “Christian doubt and anxiety” over historical accuracy of bible—not, as others may think, “an already constituted discipline of secular history”—“drove biblical scholars to develop textual techniques that have since become part of the foundation of modern, secular historiography.”, though note #53 says there were some earlier movements; (43) there was a growing split between ecclesiastical and “secular history,” and this split “shaped the modern understanding of ‘myth,’ ‘sacred discourse,’ and ‘symbolism.’…The rereading of the scriptures through the grid of myth has not only separated the sacred from the secular, it has helped to constitute the secular as the epistemological domain which history exists as history—and as anthropology.”

43-“In the mythic rereading of the scriptures, Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection could still be represented as foundational. But in the course of this reconstruction, Christian faith sought a reconsideration of the question of inspiration. God might not have literally dictated to the Old Testament prophets and to the apostles of the New, but the faithful Christian sought some sense in which they would still be said to be ‘inspired’—that is, literally breathed into by the Holy Spirit, but it was his follower Eichhorn who applied this thought systematically…Prophets, Eichhorn proposed disarmingly, were inspired artists. But what appears to have gone largely unnoticed was that while prophets were called, artists were not.”

-“Given that inspiration was no longer to be thought of as direct divine communication romantic poets identified it in a way that could be accepted by skeptics and believers alike…(44) “fragmented states” could be accessed by “radically different kinds of experience”, [eg (43) “Coleridge used sleep, waking dream, and opium”]—(44) “According to Coleridge’s theory of imagination, poetic vision presupposed the alteration of ordinary perception, regardless of how it might be attained…’imagination’ now acquired some of reason’s functions, and stood in contrast to ‘fancy.’”, Coleridge thought prophets were “creative poets who expressed a vision of their community’s past”



45-“An accumulating ethnography of shamans in the eighteenth century contributed to the recrafting of the idea of ‘inspiration’ in secular terms. (46) This involved not only the shifting of all causation from outside the world of material bodies entirely into the world, but also an ‘inside’ that had to be progressively redefined. That shift also served to separate healthy from unhealthy states of mind and behavior, and led—in the thought of Enlightenment rationalism—to the doctrine that morality be based on medical science rather than the other way around, as the older Christian view had it.”

46-from beginning of European encounters with aboriginal peoples, Christians and skeptics usually described shamans as charlatans, quacks, and the shamanic séance as “grotesque attempts at deception” like the priests and soothsayers of antiquity

-people were also skeptical of shamans’ curative abilities, (47) because pain was less and less connected with punishment from god and the (48) growth f experimentation meant the view of physician was less of healer and comforter to more of investigator; (49) “the concept of ‘experience’ that had from early on had the sense of putting something to the test was now being used to identify and internal state through an external manipulation (‘experiment’).” Eg Haller did early experiments (pain in animals; cf Dear Discipline and Experience for more on idea of “experiment”)

50-in 18th century, shaman was seen as a “poet, myth-recounter, and performing artist”—they use “flowery and unclear language”—verbal arts were connected with healing art and inspiration (like poets)—so “If shamanic rhetoric and behavior were to be viewed as art, some artists could be viewed as shamans.”

-also idea of genius evolved in 18th century drawing on classical of Orpheus and ethnographic descriptions of shamans—ecstasy was a sign now of artistic genius, Mozart was seen as having healing and “civilizing” powers acquired through inspiration, though (51) some said genius was a physical trait, kant said it was the faculty to exercise cognitive ability without being taught: those with more of these faculties (52) are smarter than those with few


52-myth was seen by romantics “as the original way of apprehending spiritual truth”—ancient prophets used to get it and now modern geniuses can—faith is not necessary, just sincerity in representing one’s feelings, and poets like Browning tried to harmonize science with religious feelings—and (53) Browning first outlined the dominant 20th century view of poetry, that it does this, and people recognize it, and James Joyce, TS Eliot and others also did it, “myth is invoked explicitly as a fictional grounding for secular values that are sensed to be ultimately without foundation.”


57-Margaret Canovan says that “The central principles of liberalism…rest on assumptions about the nature of mankind and the nature of society that are frequently questioned: ‘all men are created equal,’ ‘everyone possesses human rights,’ and so on. But no dispassionate observer of the human condition would find these descriptive propositions unproblematic, says Canovan.”

-she says when liberal ideas were formed in 18th century they “were attached to a distinctive conception of nature as deep reality.”—natural rights—and they did this “simply because in their though the idea of ‘nature’ served to explain and justify things.”, but saying that social inequality was “unnatural” was “in effect to invoke an alternative world—a mythical world…But over time their assumptions about the nature of ‘man’ exposed liberals to uncomfortable criticism” especially with early 19th century rise of sociological realism and a new view that nature was essentially violent, but liberal ideals were resurrected by the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, (38) and it is now again subject to criticism. “For when nature is interpreted positivistically in terms of statistical norms, then different norms of behavior and sentiment can claim to be equally natural. The result, we are informed, is a crippling relativism”, so you can’t defend it by just making more abstract arguments that are based on Plato’s view in the Republic: that the person and city-state have 3 parts/social class—“in a just person’s soul the upper part, reason, ensures harmony and stability, and in a just city the upper class, philosophers trained in mathematics, will impose order in a well-ordered society” and the emotions of the low class should be kept out of business of self control

58-Canovan thinks for liberalism to work you need to be open about its myth status, (59) and try to build that ideal world—everyone agrees on a myth (therefore everyone believes in a modernized myth of redemption, as opposed to a Christian version) and (59) violence is necessary to do this


61-liberal democracy has 2 conflicting secular myths: “the Enlightenment myth of politics as a discourse of public reason whose bond with knowledge enables the elite to direct the education of mankind, and the revolutionary myth of universal suffrage, a politics of large numbers in which the representation of ‘collective will’ is sought by quantifying the opinion and fantasy of individual citizen-electors…on the one hand elite liberal clarity seeks to contain religious passion, on the other hand democratic numbers allow majorities to dominate minorities even if both are religiously formed.”

62-“Secular views of the secular aren’t all the same”, eg (63) de Mans thinks secular is the “real” as exposed by science, while (64) Walter Benjamin sees the world now as “secular” because the world “must be lived in uncertainty, without the fixed moorings even for the believer…”

Asad, Formations INTRO

Asad, Talad. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2003

INTRODUCTION

SUMMARY: Asad begins by criticizing the view, as stated by Charles Taylor, that secularism and the “free society” of which secularism is a central principle, function effectively because small groups are self-motivated to reach with all the other groups of a nation a consensus that transcends the identities of each small group. However, Asad says, in reality, citizens’ self-motivation is not truly necessary for the functioning of a “secular”/”free” society; what is needed is a “sense of prosperity.” In addition, there is a weakening link between the electorate and the government which is the result of 1) small pressure groups that have disproportionate influence and 2) the mass media, controlled by small groups and the government, which shapes how people think about society—the result is: “There is no space in which all citizens can negotiate freely and equally with one another.” Therefore, the definitions of “the secular” and “the religious” are mediated and biased, not static absolutes or the result of national consensus. In fact, these mediated ideas of secularism contain various degrees of “religious” viewpoints (gives examples of US and India). Goal for book is to look at the politics/anthropology of secularism, which includes looking at how the body is represented and the other assumptions about human reality.

1-The “resurgence of religion” has shown us “that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable. But does it follow that secularism is not universally valid?”

-“Secularism as political doctrine arose in modern Euro-America”, it’s not just separating religious from secular institutions; “What is distinctive about (2) ‘secularism’ is that it presupposes new concepts of ‘religion,’ ‘ethics,’ and ‘politics’ and new imperatives associated with them.”

2-“…many people have sense this novelty and reacted to it in a variety of ways”: opponents “have rejected it as specific to the West” though advocates say it still has global relevance; Charles Taylor is in the latter camp, he “takes it for granted that the emergence of secularism is closely connected to the rise of the modern nation-state” and secularism legitimized it in 2 ways: 1) with an attempt to find a lowest common denominator among doctrines of different religious sects and 2) “the attempt to define a political ethic independent of religious convictions altogether”—“It is this latter model that is applicable throughout the world today, but only after we have adapted to it the Rawlsian idea of an overlapping consensus, which proceeds on the assumption that there can be no universally agreed basis, whether secular or religious, for the political principles accepted in a modern, heterogeneous society.”, (3) and therefore a democratic/free society is one in which people must have “a certain degree of self-enforcement”

3-But, Asad says, “The distinctive feature of modern liberal governance…is neither compulsion (force) nor negotiation (consent) but the statecraft that uses ‘self-discipline’ and ‘participation,’ ‘law’ and ‘economy’ as elements of political strategy,” and the system isn’t in danger when there’s lack of self-enforcement by citizens, it’s only in danger “when the general population ceases to enjoy any sense of prosperity”—(4) good policing and an economy that doesn’t treat certain groups too bad are more important than self-discipline

4-plus there is an increasing weakening of a “direct link between the electorate and its parliamentary representatives” and this loss is not compensated in “extra-parliamentary institutions connected to governance”; in fact the opposite is true—pressure groups’ influence on government is usually far greater than “the proportion of the electorate whose interests they directly promote”

-also the ”mass media, increasingly owned by conglomerates and often cooperating with the state, mediate the political reactions of the public and its sense of guarantee and threat”, “Thus in crucial ways this is not a direct-access society. There is no space in which all citizens can negotiate freely and equally with one another. The existence of negotiation in public life is confined to such elites as party bosses, bureaucratic administrators, parliamentary legislators, and business leader. The ordinary citizen does not participate in the process of formulating policy options as these elites do—his or her participation in periodic elections does not even guarantee that the policies voted for will be adhered to.”


5-“…the media are not simply the means through with individuals simultaneously imagine their national community; they mediate that imagination, construct the sensibilities that underpin it.”

*-and the idea that a national mediated identity must transcend conflicting perspectives (eg class, gender, religion) is, “In an important sense,” what secularism is; beyond being an intellectual way of dealing with the world, secularism “is an enactment by which a political medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and religion. In contrast, the process of mediation enacted in ‘premodern’ societies includes ways in which the state mediates local identities without aiming at transcendence.”

-the forms of mediation in medieval Christianity and Islam were indeed different than those used today, but it’s not simply that they were “religious” and modern governments aren’t. eg British government’s connection to the Established Church and the US’s largely religious population (each modern country has different mediation and imaginary)

6-Asad criticizes Taylor’s theory on consensus—that different groups work out short term solutions for each issue—because it ends up being that the weaker groups has no choice, plus the state regulates its views through violence, so (7) violence in the modern West is “closely connected with the rise of a system of capitalist nation-states,” with groups and states “grossly unequal in power and personality” and therefore the mediation in each state is different

7-eg in the US after 9/11 “spokespersons” tried to define the US “as ‘good’ in opposition to its ‘evil’ enemies at home and abroad.” Which works b/c the US has religious roots and a continues high level of religious faith as well as the belief that “America is the world’s last best hope of liberty” and this has also led to oppression and intolerance of “foreign” elements (something which has been going on in the US since the late 18th c); “the repeated explosions of intolerance in American history—however understandable they may be—they are entirely compatible (indeed intertwined) with secularism in a highly modern society”

8-another example is India which has a secular constitution and “an outstanding record as a functioning liberal democracy”, yet there are frequent “communal riots” (between religious groups); notes P. Chatterjee and others who agree that “the publicly recognizable personality of the nation is strongly mediated by representations of a reconstructed high-caste Hinduism” putting “religious minorities” in a defensive position

-“A secular state does not guarantee toleration; it puts into play different structures of ambition and fear. The law never seeks to eliminate violence since its object is always to regulate violence.”


-it is difficult to differentiate between private reason and public principle (“the secular”). Gives several examples: (9) “literature”, which has a secular connotation, can be applied to the bible and still read in a “religious way; the popular idea of “Islamic roots of violence” is taken as a given, though (10) violence does not need to be justified by the Qur’an”—there is also an idea that the Qur’an (11) forces Muslims to use violence while “Christians and Jews are free to interpret the Bible as they please”; determining if something has a “religious motive”, does it have to be a sincere expression? Or, as Freud assumes, is there always an unconscious motive for religious motives, rendering all motives secular? And this means that there must be an authority that determines what is secular and what is religious, and this is done through mediating agencies (12) like law courts, the national media, parliamentary forums; another example: Are actors “secular” when they work with “religious” actors (eg CIA helping Muslim fighters)?

13-the idea that modernity has given reality “new experiences of space and time, or cruelty and health, of consumption and knowledge” and that “these experiences constitute ‘disenchantment’—implying a direct access to reality, a stripping away of myth, magic, and the sacred—is a salient feature of the modern epoch. It is, arguably, a product of nineteenth-century romanticism, partly linked to (14) the growing habit of reading imaginative literature—being enclosed within and by it—so that images of a ‘pre-modern’ past acquire in retrospect a quality of enchantment.”

14-his interest is in looking at “the attempt to construct categories of the secular and the religious in terms of which modern living is required to take place, and nonmodern peoples are invited to assess their adequacy” because representations of “the secular” and “the religious” “mediate people’s identities, help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences.”


-Asad Does not agree with the idea of the end of (Hegelian) History with the end of communism, he believes the US’ values have now become dominant (15) spread with the OECD, IMF, World Bank and other institutions; and the American model is not just economic, but moral and political too—and includes secularism

-we should therefore look at the politics of how views are spread of the American (and other binary-style, “good” v. “evil”) ideal as well those of the ideal of multiplicity


16-Asad is influenced by Foucault and Nietzsche, but does not rigidly follow them

17-“What is distinctive about modern anthropology is the comparison of embedded concepts (representations) between societies differently located in time and space” and an anthropology of secularism asks “How do attitudes to the human body (to pain, physical damage, decay, and death, to physical integrity, bodily growth, and sexual enjoyment) differ in various forms of life? What structures of the senses…do these attitudes depend on? In what ways does the law define and regulate practices and doctrines on the grounds that they are ‘truly human’? What discursive space does this work of definition and regulation open up for grammars of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’? How do these sensibilities, attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors come together to support or undermine the doctrine of secularism?”